Global Warming

Plants Could Be Moderating Climate Change

Small particles released by plants in warmer weather could help to boost cloud production and reduce the effect of global warming, a new study suggests.

By surveying nearly a dozen forests across Europe, North America and southern Africa, a team of Finnish physicists found that in warmer weather, plants tend to emit higher concentrations of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) into the atmosphere.

When these small, floating chemicals bind with water vapor, they can create the “seeds” of clouds.

With more VOCs in the air, we can expect to see more clouds in the sky.

That could be good news for those concerned about climate change.

As warmer weather leads to higher levels of cloud production, more sunlight will be deflected back into space and prevented from warming the surface of the Earth.

But the authors of the study, writing in the journal Nature Geoscience, caution that the global impact of this cloud-seeding effect is expected to be quite small.

While higher VOC emissions may help to cut rising local temperatures by as much as 30 percent, the study found that it can only be expected to slow the global warming trend by a mere one-percent.

The implications of the study may still be important. As Pauli Paasonen, lead author of the study points out, the role of sun-deflecting “aerosols” in the atmosphere is one of the least well understood factors of climate change.